Maya 3D Workshop- 16th Feb

This week we were moving on to create our planet. We were using a new piece of software alongside Maya called Sculptris; a free modelling tool which is more like sculpting clay than starting from scratch modelling. It allows me to create very high polygon models very quickly to create more detail.

To start with we opened a sphere in Sculptris, and began to add craters and texture using the draw, pinch, inflate etc. tools:

After I was happy with my model, I next had to export the object as a .obj file, and then import it into Maya. I could then create a new sphere to add over the top of my high polygon object, in order to 'vacuum form' it to create a low polygon version:

To create this low polygon version, I had to do something called 'baking'. This is a way of taking the detail of an object and imprinting this onto another object. In this case, we would be using our Sculptris designed model to imprint the detail on to our low polygon Maya sphere. To do this, we opened up a window and chose our source model and our target model, and then selected that we wanted the normals to be created and baked onto the object:

This would then export the sample we have taken as an image to allow us to see whether our baking has worked, which we can tell by the normals exported matching that of the object, rather than having odd bulges or other anomalies:

Once this was done, I separated the Sculptris model from the freshly baked model to see the comparison:

On the left is the original, and on the right is baked version.

I then sampled it again like I did with the normals, but this time using ambient occlusion.

Now that we had done this to our object, I could think about adding colours and textures to make it look like a more interesting object. I can do this in the same way as I have in previous models. First, I add a blinn, and then choose an image to add to the planet texture. I added my colour to the ambient occlusion so not to lose the properties it brought to the object. However, now it looked flat and so I had to use a 'bump map' which allows me to add my normals to my blinn to preserve the detail I had gained from it.

Now I have my planet!